L. J. Robert

L. J. Robert served the Washington church of the Georgia Association from October 1846 to October 1848. It is assumed that he was  born about 1825 and died after 1888. Associations in which he served other than the Georgia were the Tallapoosa, 1848-1851; the Western, 1872-74; the Central, 1868-69; the Stone Mountain, 1856-57; and the Bowen, 1877-83, 1885-88.


  Three of his relatives are mentioned below.


ROBERT, HENRY MARTYN (1837-1923). Henry Martyn Robert, author of Robert's Rule of Order and consulting engineer of the Galveston seawall, was born on May 2, 1837, in Robertville, South Carolina, son of Rev. Joseph Thomas and Adeline (Lawton) Robert. His ancestor Pierre Robert was pastor of the first Huguenot colony in South Carolina. Reverend Robert was against slavery and moved his family to the Midwest when Henry was a child. Robert was appointed to West Point from Ohio and graduated fourth in his class in 1857. From 1867 until his retirement he was involved with most of the major river and harbor improvement and fortification projects undertaken by the United States government. He worked on the Columbia River and on rivers in Oregon and Washington. He built lighthouses on lakes Michigan, Erie, Ontario, and Champlain, and on the Saint Lawrence River. He made river and harbor improvements on Long Island Sound and New York Harbor. He was engineer-commissioner for improvements on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers and was a member of various boards of engineering, such as the New York Board of Engineers, the New York Harbor Line Board, and the Philadelphia Line Board.
(Wiley H. Simms, Will of 3 Dec 1871

Georgia, Troup County: Mr. James S. Walker, L. J. Robert, and C. H. C. Willingham were present on Sunday the third day of December 1871 at the residence of Wiley H. Simms before his death and in his last illness and after having been advised by his attending physician that he must soon die. And in full possession of all his mental faculties, the said Wiley H. Simms did call in the said subscribers to his bedside and request religious services there to be held which were conducted by the said L. J. Robert, a minister of the gospeL

Among James Petigru Boyce's classmates at Brown University, and for a while his room-mate, was Milton G. Robert, of Robertville, S. C, belonging to a familywhich produced several distinguished Baptists. In visiting his brother, Rev. L. J. Robert, pastor at Wash-ington, Ga., this young man made a marriage engagement with Miss Colby, of that place, and he still lived in the vicinity in1888. He became a member of the Washington church and was a messenger from the church to eleven meetings of the Georgia Association, 1854-1860, 1866, 1872, 1886, and 1888.  After their graduation he took James P. Boyce with him to Washington, as one of the "waiters" at the wedding, Dec. 9, 1847. One of the bride's attendants, though not his partner, was Miss Lizzie Llewellyn Ficklen, daughter of Dr. Fielding Ficklen, of that village. It is related by a resident that the young man became quite enamoured that evening. The next day, when the wedding party were going into the country to dine, he was reproached by the bridegroom for asking to accompany Miss Ficklen instead of his partner. Things went so fast with his feelings that in returning from the country dinner he asked her to marry him, but without success. In fact, it cost the ardent youth several months of repeated visits, to say nothing of numerous letters, before he couldgain any promise of marriage.


In 1773 Sarah Robert, granddaughter of Pierre Robert married Joseph Lawton of Edisto Island. They and other Robert, Lawton, Maner, Bostick, Grimball family members moved west in South Carolina to a community later named Robertville. We traveled to Robertville, Estill and Lawtonville on Jan. 17. Though most of the homesites were destroyed in the Civil War, the cemeteries tell the story of our ancestors' lives and influence in this part of South Carolina.

Dr. Ficklen had come from Virginia, where his brother, George Ficklen, was an eminent citizen and leading Baptist of the famous Gourd Vine Church, in Culpeper County, and another brother, Burwell Ficklen, was an honored citizen of Fredericksburg ; while the family connection includes a number of well-known men in different parts of that State. The Ficklens were of Welsh origin, and one fancies that they exhibit some of the better Celtic traits of character. Dr. Ficklen's wife was Miss Frances Ann

Wingfield, whose grandfather came from Albemarle County, Va., the name showing an English family. The doctor did not give his whole attention to the practice of medicine in Washington, but turned more and more towards planting, in which he was quite successful. In middle life he became a Christian, and afterwards a greatly honored deacon of the Baptist church in Washington, — a man of frank and manly bearing, " transparent candor, scrupulous conscientiousness, and Christian probity," and notably strict in his ideas of Christian life and of church discipline. Miss Lizzie had been educated in a very remarkable school at Washington, which had been built up especially through the efforts of Adam Alexander (father of the Confederate general, now railroad president), whose numerous daughters, there educated, became the wives of distinguished men in Georgia and South Carolina. The lady principal at the time when Lizzie was educated was Miss Bracket, who had come from the North, and afterwards married Dr. Nehemiah Adams, a well-known Congregational minister of Boston.

Washington is a pleasant village in NortheasternGeorgia, eighteen miles north of the Georgia Railroad, and not far from the South Carolina line. It is the centre of a rolling and healthy country, which the Wingfields compared to Albemarle, very fertile in grain and cotton. Here the famous Jesse Mercer was the first Baptist pastor, and started here, in 1833, ''The Christian Index," which is still the Baptist paper of Georgia. Here lived the celebrated Senator Robert Toombs, and Alexander H. Stephens went to school here, — in a square wooden building which still stands, — but made the home of his life at

Crawfordville, in an adjoining county. Thus the village and surrounding country presented good society,